A Comprehensive Taxonomy of Argumentative Thesis Statements: A Preliminary Pilot Study

Abstract

Although it is universally acknowledged that argumentative texts constitute the core of academic discourse and that their production is the most difficult task for students to master, there is hardly any research available on the pivotal component of argumentative texts: the thesis statement. This paper presents a preliminary pilot study whose aim was to propose a comprehensive taxonomy of argumentative thesis statements, to test the taxonomy on argumentative essays, to investigate student preferences for argumentative thesis statement types, and to attempt to explain the relationship between thesis type selection and the prompt given to students in the essay writing task. For the purposes of the investigation, a subsection (N = 225) of the Hungarian Corpus of Learner English was selected and their thesis statements coded independently by two coders with the help of a codebook following a coder training. The results showed that the proposed taxonomy is suitable for the identification and categorisation of argumentative thesis statements, but they also revealed weaknesses in the codebook that need to be addressed. The findings provided insights into student preferences concerning argumentative thesis statement types with two thesis types (Simple policy and Causal theses) emerging as the most frequent. It was also found that in the investigated sample there is no relationship between the prompt and the argumentative thesis types. The proposed taxonomy is recommended for use in the writing classroom in order to familiarise students with the diversity of argumentative thesis statement options.